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Thirty Endangered Languages in the Philippines Thomas N View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UND Scholarly Commons (University of North Dakota) Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session Volume 47 Article 1 2003 Thirty endangered languages in the Philippines Thomas N. Headland SIL-UND Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/sil-work-papers Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Headland, Thomas N. (2003) "Thirty endangered languages in the Philippines," Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session: Vol. 47 , Article 1. DOI: 10.31356/silwp.vol47.01 Available at: https://commons.und.edu/sil-work-papers/vol47/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session by an authorized editor of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Thirty Endangered Languages in the Philippines1 Thomas N. Headland Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, Texas, and University of North Dakota There are 6,809 languages spoken in the world today. Conservative estimates are that the world’s languages are currently dying at the rate of at least two languages each month, and linguists predict that most of today's languages will die out in the next 100 years. Since 1962, the author has been gathering field data on some of the smallest language groups in the world—the Philippine Negritos. This paper will explain why the thirty-plus Negrito languages in the Philippines are endangered, and what the projected future is for these numerically tiny post- foraging societies in the 21st century. The argument will be supported by a review of the population sizes, interethnic human rights problems, and the environmental destruction of the rainforests of these marginalized peoples. Thirty-two endangered Negrito languages There are between 100 and 150 languages spoken in the Philippines today. A fourth of these languages—thirty-two—are spoken by different Negrito ethnolinguistic populations scattered throughout the archipelago (Grimes 2000)2. They are considered to be the aborigines of the Philippines whose ancestors migrated into these islands over 20,000 years ago. In early Spanish times these Negrito peoples numbered 10% of the Philippine population, living by hunting, gathering and trading forest products with non-Negrito coastal peoples. The other 90% of the people were oriental-looking farmers, descendents of the early Austronesians who began migrating into the Islands much later, only about 5,000 years ago. Today the Negrito groups total some 33,000 people, comprising only 0.05% of the present national population. Clearly something has gone wrong with these tiny aboriginal foraging populations in the last 300 years (Bennagen 1977; Griffin and Headland 1994; Headland 1989; Eder 1987). All of these 32 Negrito groups speak endangered languages. Sixteen of these groups live in the Sierra Madre mountain range that extends north and south down the entire eastern side of Luzon Island. Each group speaks its own Austronesian language, which they call Agta.3 Each Agta language (or dialect) is mutually intelligible with one or two of its closest neighboring Agta languages (see the Appendix). I briefly describe here the story of one of those 16 Agta groups. 1Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Ninth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, Edinburgh, Scotland, September 9-13, 2002, and at the 101st Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, November 20-24, 2002. I am indebted to the following for written critical comments on those earlier drafts: William Bright, Janet Headland, Peter Ladefoged, Stephen Marlett, Mary Beck Moser, Peter Unseth, and Mary Ruth Wise. 2The ethnonym “Negrito,” a term the Spaniards introduced into the Tagalog language in the 1500s, is still used in Southeast Asia to refer to several small populations found in West Malaysia, the Andaman Islands, and the Philippines, because of their phenotypically different features: darker skin pigmentation, fuzzy or wooly hair, and smaller body size. The term is not pejorative to the Agta or to Filipinos in general. 3Three of these 16 groups refer to themselves and their language by the terms “Alta” or “Arta”, which are cognates of the ethnonym “Agta”. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session, vol. 47 (2003) http://www.und.edu/dept/linguistics/wp/2003Headland.PDF Copyright © 2003 by SIL International Headland: Thirty Endangered Languages in the Philippines 2 The case of the Casiguran Agta The Casiguran Agta people live in the foothills and seacoast of the Sierra Madre near the town of Casiguran, Aurora Province. They numbered 1,000 people in 1936, and 800 when my wife, Janet Headland, and I began living with them in 1962. In 1977 they numbered 617 people, and in 1984, 609 (Headland 1989). Their population has remained stationary since the 1980s at around 600 (Early and Headland 1998). The Agta were still hunters and gatherers when we met them in 1962, living in the largest rainforest in the Philippines. As SIL workers with just two summers of basic linguistics under Kenneth Pike, and married just five months when we starting living with the Agta, Janet and I were filled with romantic expectations. Our vision was to learn their language so we could teach them to read it and to translate the Bible into it. As young college graduates, we knew better than to expect the Agta speech to be primitive; but we were still astonished as we discovered the richness of it and how completely different it was from English and from other foreign languages we had studied (Spanish and Greek). It was fun living in the rainforest with the Agta in those days when they were still foragers, getting our protein from the forest: deer, monkey, wild pig, and fish. The Agta seemed fascinating then—with their G-strings, lean-to shelters, and bows and arrows. Many did not even know they lived in the Philippines. As late as 1974, they still scored such low levels on tests of comprehension in the main trade languages of the area, Tagalog and Ilokano, that it was evident they were not able to understand them.4 Life is different for the Casiguran Agta today. Although the population decline has stopped, much of their traditional lifeways are gone. Only 3% of their old-growth tropical forest remains, and the game and fish are almost extinct, as are most of the plants and trees important to the Agta. Logging and mining companies, and thousands of Filipino farmer-settlers have taken over Agta lands, where in northern Aurora they now outnumber the Casiguran Agta people by 85 to 1. Instead of living in the rainforest distant from lowland Filipino farming communities, almost all Agta families since 1990 have lived on or near farming settlements where they work as casual laborers for Tagalog lowlanders in exchange for rice, liquor, used clothing, and cash. If they didn’t know Tagalog or that they lived in the Philippines when we first met them, the multilingual Agta today can often discuss in Tagalog the latest international news stories, and find their way to Manila on the new government road that reached Casiguran in 1977. The traditional Agta culture is not only endangered, but moribund. The Agta have changed today to a post- foraging landless peasant society.5 One startling example of the kind of acculturative changes entering the Agta ecosystem by the 1980s was when my wife and I went on November 4, 1983, to visit an Agta camp at Dimagipo, south of Casiguran. Here is a paragraph from our fieldnotes for that day: When we arrived at the camp at 9:30 that morning, 12 of the 24 Agta adults in the camp were drunk. This in itself was no surprise. What did seem unusual was the mood the Agta 4Using Casad’s (1974) method, we formally tested many Agta adults for their comprehension of several Philippine languages in the 1970s. Results were published in Headland (1975). Casiguran Agta testees scored 73% comprehension in Tagalog and zero in Ilokano. This means they could answer correctly on average 73% of the questions we asked them about simple Tagalog stories we played for each testee on audiotape. That is a failing score. According to the Casad method, testees in a language community should score an average of at least 82% to be considered “bilingual” in the trade language (Tagalog in this case). 5Key references describing the present deculturation of the Agta people are found in Griffin 1994, Early and Headland 1998, Headland and Headland 1997, Rai 1990, and most recently in Headland and Blood 2002. A complete bibliography of all scholarly references on the Agta peoples may be found at Headland and Griffin 1997. Headland: Thirty Endangered Languages in the Philippines 3 were in, including the children. It turned out they had been up all night. One of their former trading partners, a Casiguran townsman, had recently returned from a two-year employment stint in Saudi Arabia. He was sharing his homecoming celebration with his former Agta clients with a complete ‘blowout’—a feast, liquor, and especially a night of watching hardcore pornographic videotapes on his Betamax TV set, which he and his cronies had carried up to the camp along with a generator! Such is an example of culture change among Philippine tribal people today. [Headland 1986:293] Before we explore further the question of the Agta languages, we need to ask what an endangered language is, why and how fast languages die out, and why we should care about this.
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